2012 – Page 56 – Shall Not Be Questioned

For That Person Who Said We Needed Vision Tests

Congrats to Mr. Completely, for getting a positive article about shooting and shooters into the main stream media. And just a note to “Dog Gone” who suggested we all needed to pass vision tests, like keeping and bearing arms was some kind of privilege doled out by the likes of her:

Itâ€™s a trick heâ€™s learned pretty well. The nearly lifelong South Whidbey resident is undoubtedly the islandâ€™s quickest and greatest crack shot with a record in Steel Challenge competition shooting to prove it.

Heâ€™s also nearly blind.

Suffering from presbyopia, a condition in which the eye loses the ability to focus and makes it extremely difficult to see objects up close, Gallion is severely farsighted. His vision is roughly 20/400.

The condition forces him to wear three different pairs of glasses. Itâ€™s a hurdle few in his sport have to contend with â€” most of those who do well donâ€™t wear glasses at all. However, poor eyesight hasnâ€™t seemed to hurt Gallionâ€™s record.

Since he started a little more than a decade ago, the 67-year-old has secured about 100 first place finishes â€” at least five of which are state championships â€” including a gold medal at an international competition in Holland this past May.

If we put Mr. C into a head-to-head competition with successive members of the NYPD, I’d put big money on Mr. C besting all of them, and if I was going to be this guy, I’d certainly feel a lot better with Mr. C behind the trigger than most of the folks the gun control crowd says are “responsible and trained enough” to bear arms.Â People can find ways to deal with advantages and disadvantages. Bitter is nearly blind too, enough that if she loses her glasses, I’d have to help her find them. Enough that she can’t do well with skeet because the field of vision outside her glasses is so bad she can’t see the bird until it’s practically in front of her.Â Yet I’m fairly certain she could put 16 rounds into a man sized target at 7 yards, even under stress, without hitting 9 other people.

And “Dog Gone” wants to tell shooters that they need a vision test for exercising a right? I print this stuff because sometimes the nerve of these people appalls me.Â I’m sure that people like “Dog Gone” and Joan Peterson think themselves big advocates for the rights of people with disabilities in any other context, until they decide they want to exercise their Second Amendment rights, that is. Sure, maybe a disabled hunter would be fine by them, but the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, and never has been.Â It’s hard not to walk away with the notion that they absolutely hate people that decide to exercise their rights. In that sense they are all for equality, whether disabled, black or white, rich or poor. They would have everyone equally disarmed and rendered powerless.

Happy Labor Day Folks

Today is the day we celebrate labor by not doing any. When you work from home, three day weekends don’t have the same feel. First off, it’s easy to forget. You don’t have coworkers reminding you, or asking you about what you’ll be doing over the long weekend. It would have been easy to come down here and start working, forgetting completely it’s a holiday. It also doesn’t quite feel like a day off. Now, a day off is when I leave the house. If I come down here to my office, invariably I start doing something, because all my somethings are right here. So to have time off, I generally have to be focused on activities away from the computer. If I get bored, I’ll come down here and work on something.

So today it’s going to be smoking up some baby back ribs. My smoke wood will be cherry, and I’ll have to formulate a rub. My rubs for chicken tend to be lighter, focusing more on onion, garlic, sometimes ginger or coriander, and other flavors that go well with chicken. My rubs for pork tend to be redder, sometimes with fennel, and other spices that go well with pork. Â Beef I like peppery, both from pepper peppers and chili peppers. A lot of times I just mix spices, salt, and sugar together until it tastes good. On ribs I tend to cheat. I’ve found the 3-2-1 method, of smoking for 3 hours, foiling for two, and finishing for 1 hour ends with the best results. Sometimes I only foil for an hour. I’ve successfully done ribs without foil, but I tend to prefer moister, more tender ribs, and I have a hard time getting that without foiling.

For a side, we really like this cole slaw recipe. Bitter hates blue cheese, but loves this. I gave it to someone else who hates cole slaw and they loved it. It goes great with a beef dish, and also pork. Usually we’ll cheat and use bacon bits from a jar (the real ones, the fakes ones are an abomination). I’ll also probably concoct some legume-based side as well. So that’s my “Yay! It’s a holiday,” plan for not hanging around the office too much.

Sometimes They Are Honest, At Least

In at least one Brady supporter’s mind, what would be required for gun carrying and ownership gun?Â I point this out because it’s very rare for gun control advocates to elucidate detailed views of what policies they actually propose, once you get past whatever “common sense gun safety measures” that happen to be the cause du jure they feel like they might have a chance to ram through Congress. Instead of policy discussions, you get a lot of NRA evil, blah blah blah, for the children, blah blah blah, we have to do something, blah blah blah. So I tend to appreciate it when I see some honesty.

I have advocated for regular testing, including physical ability to be steady with a gun, eye testing the way we do for driving that would require someone to be wearing their glasses if they use their firearm – or even just carry it. Regular renewals, not a for life permitting (or non-permitting in the case of AZ). Peformance testing annually. Drug testing, including for alcohol abuse because of the links between violence and aggression, poor impulse control and judgment impairment. Some sort of psychology screening to keep the obvious, known dangerously mentally ill from acquiring firearms – like Ian Stawicki, Jared Loughner, James Holmes. A requirement of insurance for gun ownership and for carrying, so that there is guaranteed compensation for anyone shot in error or by accident or even by an evil intentional shooting. Repeal of all shoot first laws, and a reinforcement that if you shoot someone, and you are wrong, you are held fully legally accountable for doing so, not given an exemption from criminal or civil court proceedings.

Until that didn’t work, and then there were so few gun owners left, they didn’t have any power to stand up to outright prohibition. Which still wouldn’t work, just like prohibiting things people want has never worked anywhere it’s been tried, but hey, it makes people feel good.

We treat no other constitutional right this way, so my only offer on compromise here is to say “No f**king way!” and fight them every step of the way down that slippery slope, and continue to try to push the gun control movement back up, and then hopefully down the other side to somewhere around Carrie Nation Gulch.Â It’s a constitutional right. It has to be treated like one. Because of how we treat other constitutional rights, that still leaves a lot of room for measures I probably won’t like, just like I don’t agree with all the 1st Amendment or 4th Amendment jurisprudence. But most people, and the courts, still treat these Amendments as serious limits on governmental power, which by their existence proscribe certain policy choices (though that’s getting iffy for the 4th, but I digress). If you don’t like the implications of that, you can work to change the Constitution. But you have to start from there. There is no negotiating on that. You can’t just pretend that is not the case, and you can’t just reinterpret it, absent any historical evidence and against the understanding of the vast majority of Americans, to suggest it has no meaning.

An Interesting Observation on RNC2012

Taking a break from landscaping a bit, and the drudgery of moving crushed stone around from places that don’t need it to places that do. I noticed some criticism from my last RNC post form Bill Quick, with a link in the comment section to a Reason article that I feel sums up the point I was trying to make nicely:

Mitt Romney may indeed be a deliberately empty vessel (for the definitive framing on his approach to politics, please read Peter Suderman’s excellent cover story from March, “Consultant in Chief“), but empty vessels have a habit of tacking to the wind. One striking, even unrecognizable difference between the 2012 RNC and the convention just four years ago is that there is a generation of legitimately interesting new Republican politiciansâ€“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker,Â Sen. Rand PaulÂ of Kentucky, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Texas senatorial candidate Ted Cruz, Puerto Rico GovernorÂ Luis FortuÃ±oÂ â€“ who campaigned on tackling the real structural problems facing the country, and have largely (though not completely) kept up their end of the bargain.

These people weren’t afterthoughts during the convention, grudgingly given off-prime speaking slots; theyÂ wereÂ the featured speakers. They reflect (and were mostly brought into the office by) the populist, anti-big-government uprising that has rocked the country since the fall of 2008, and they are precipitating long-overdue conversations within the GOP about cutting spending, reforming entitlements, reducing public-sector compensation, and even reducing military expenditure. They are the ones who have the juice and the momentum within the Republican Party, even if they haven’t yet produced a presidential nominee.

Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan (read Peter Suderman’s great profile ofÂ himÂ here) isn’t precisely of their generation, or radicalism, but he’s cut from the same philosophical cloth. As FreedomWorks’ Matt KibbeÂ told me, “RyanÂ isÂ a real market guyâ€“I know all of his flaws, I know all of his bad votes, but by choosing Ryan the party has conceded that it actually has to defend these ideas, including entitlement reform.” Ryan’s selection can be read as a sign that the S.S. Romney felt the wind blowing from the fiscal conservative grassroots.

Read the Whole Thing, as they say. I am under no delusion that Romney is now suddenly an ideal candidate. Having lived in and worked in politics in Massachusetts for a number of years, Bitter is well familiar with his quirks and flaws. He will stick his finger into the air and see which way the winds blowing, he can follow bad advice, and yes, when Governor of the most Democratic, liberal state in the nation, he’ll pass the model for Obamacare if he doesn’t think he can afford not to. But my observation is that he seems to have committed his campaign to the idea that the wind is blowing in the direction of shrinking the size and scope of government. As long as we keep the wind blowing in that direction, Mitt will go along. He’s that kind of politician. Obama doesn’t care which direction the wind blows. In his mind he is a transformative being, out to remake America, and that’s all that matters to him.

Closing of the RNC 2012

With the close of the RNC Convention, we only have to endure one more party convention, and then the silly season is officially in full force. The silly season is where I try to pretend that Mitt wasn’t my second choice in 2008, when the other choice was McCain, who was not exactly my first choice when the field was still open. But I have to say, I’m at least starting to think that McCain was really the inferior candidate in the 2008 primary.

Perhaps because I did not start out with high expectations for Mitt Romney, he has managed to surprise me. He’s run his campaign well, whereas McCain’s campaign was a disaster . I’m not worried that Romney is going to go crazy before the election like Col. Tigh did when the financial crisis hit. I can still remember watching that sorry display and telling Bitter “Well, that’s it I think. He just lost the election.” While Sarah Palin is was a breath of fresh air compared to the top of the ticket in 2008, she does not have Paul Ryan’s depth on issues. The Romney Campaign has also hit Obama a lot harder even in this early stage of the campaign, than McCain’s people ever did. I believe that the debates this time will not be as painful to watch, and to be honest, I’d be worried if I were Obama heading into those debates. Good thing he stacked the deck with moderators.

And as for Mitt’s speech, I have to agree with Jim Geraghty on this one. From his Morning Jolt:

At times, he was scary good.

No, really, where has that Mitt Romney been all year? All campaign? Since 2007?

Every time he’s given a nice speech after a primary victory, I would usually joke on Twitter, “ah, looks like those new personality software upgrades are working out, he sounds much more natural now,” or something like that. (It’s a perennial; asÂ Erick EricksonÂ said last night, “Romney v.6.5 is pretty awesome.”)

But the Mitt Romney we saw tonight . . . it’s as if he had been saving up every bit of his inner emotional life, his soft, sentimental side, and let it all out. This was a speech that requires us to reexamine what we think we know about Romney.

Bitter and I are political junkies, who tend to follow this stuff like sports, only a sport where you kind of hate all the teams and most of the players. We listen to a lot of speeches, and most political speeches will bowl you over with a feather, assuming you aren’t sleeping through it. But even I have to admit, Romney’s speech last night was one of the best political speeches I’ve seen in a long time from the GOP.

After watching most of the convention, though sometimes not paying attention when the speech’s were boring or bad (which is honestly most of them), Mitt seems committed to running the party on a message of economic and fiscal conservatism, in other words, the things conservatives and libertarians tend to agree on. There have been about as many bones tossed to the Huckabee wing of the party as there have been to gun owners, which is to say, not many. I think Romney has made a conscious decision to downplay social issues, and if that continues during the campaign, it’ll certainly help me feel better about things, but it ups the stakes considerably. A loss on that message will be a signal to the GOP it needs to go back to the Rove strategy of ginning up the social conservative base, and talking about compassionate conservatism (i.e. big government conservatism) to the soft middle who are happy to let the government do things that make them feel good while it spends itself into bankruptcy. The fiscal problems of this country are not easy, and it’ll be difficult no matter who’s in the White House, but Romney is signaling he’s up to the job. Is he? The only thing I know for sure there is Obama definitely isn’t.

To Crimp, or not to Crimp?

I’ve gotten 50 rounds of 6.8 Remington SPC loaded, and 100 round of .223 loaded. I have a progressive press a reader sent me a while back (a Lee, which he didn’t use anymore and wanted to get rid of), but I only have the necessary equipment to load pistol ammo with it, and the Lee progressive has a rough time with that, so I’d be worried with rifle ammo.

For rifle ammo, I’m loading on a single stage press. For practice ammo, I don’t weigh each charge, and I’ve actually found the Lee powder charger throws a pretty consistent load once you run it five or six times. I’m limited in speed mostly by press time. I do 50 at a time. My process is as follows.

Run 50 rounds through the tumbler to clean off the brass.
Stage them on my reloading block, after running them through the separator.
Spray them with some reloaders KY.
Decap & resize on the press & move to finish block.
Seat the primers, move back to staging block.
Adjust the powder throw, charge 50 cases, move to finish block.
Check all the cases for proper charge, seat the bullets.
Seat all the bullets, measuring the first few for overall length, moving to staging block.
Crimp bullets on the press.

The last part I’ve heard various advice on. Some people suggest you don’t need to crimp the bullets, and that the military only does it because they have to stand up to rough handling in machine guns. When I first starting reloading, I’m pretty sure I was over crimping, which can be dangerous. But I still tend to think a light crimp on the bullet is good for firing through a semi-auto, despite the extra cycle through the press it takes for each batch of 50. What do you think? To crimp or not to crimp?

It’s Reloading Time

Several days of ridiculously nice weather had me itching to take the AR-15 to the range, but suddenly realizing I’m way too low on .223 ammo interfered with my plans. Looking online, ammunition is still scarce and expensive, so it’s time to dust off the reloading bench. Fortunately, I still have plenty of Varget, plenty of 55gr bullets, and a metric crapload of once fired .223 brass. I’m going to fill up all my plastic containers, so my goal is 250 rounds.

I also figure as long as I’m getting everything together, I might as well finish off all my once fired 6.8 Remington SPC and get the rest of those loaded. It’s not more than 50 rounds, but I never really shoot the 6.8 AR. I don’t look all that favorably on boutique rounds these days, and I’d sort of sorry I made an investment in it. My remaining 6.8 once fired brass is stuff I brought back from the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno, years ago, so it gives you an idea of how seldom I shoot that caliber.

I think the next AR I build needs to be a .22LR. It’s hard to have less than several thousand rounds on hand, and it’s cheap.

Embody Suit Dismissed by 6th Circuit

From the decision:

For his troubles, Embody has done something rare: He has taken a position onÂ the Second and Fourth Amendment that unites the Brady Center to Prevent GunÂ Violence and the Second Amendment Foundation. Both organizations think that theÂ park ranger permissibly disarmed and detained Leonard Embody that day,Â notwithstanding his rights to possess the gun. So do we.

This was a bad case taken forward by someone who doesn’t want to leave things to experts, so SAF went in with arguments that would kill the suit. The Court essentially concluded it was a legitimate Terry stop, so there was no 4th Amendment case to be made:

Embody does not quarrel with this accounting of what happened. To his mind, all thatÂ matters is that carrying an AK-47 pistol in a state park is legal under Tennessee law; the gunâ€™sÂ resemblance to an assault rifle, the conspicuous arming of it, his military clothing and theÂ concerns of passers-by add nothing. But the constitutional question is whether the officers hadÂ reasonable suspicion of a crime, not whether a crime occurred. Otherwise, all failedÂ investigatory stops would lead to successful Â§ 1983 actions. Having worked hard to appearÂ suspicious in an armed-and-loaded visit to the park, Embody cannot cry foul after park rangers,Â to say nothing of passers-by, took the bait. The officers stopped him only as long as it took toÂ investigate the legitimacy of the weapon and, at his insistence, bring the supervisor to the park.Â No Fourth Amendment violation occurred.

The court skirted the Second Amendment issue by upholding the qualified immunity of the officers in question:

To the extent Embody means to argue that the Second Amendment prevents TennesseeÂ from prohibiting certain firearms in state parks (and thus prohibited Ward from detainingÂ Embody on suspicion of possessing an illegal firearm), qualified immunity is the answer. SeeÂ Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). No court has held that the SecondÂ Amendment encompasses a right to bear arms within state parks. See District of Columbia v.Â Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) (individual right to bear arms in the home); United States v.Â Masciandaro, 638 F.3d 458 (4th Cir. 2011) (upholding regulation prohibiting firearms inÂ national parks). Such a right may or may not exist, but the critical point for our purposes is thatÂ it has not been establishedâ€”clearly or otherwise at this point. That suffices to resolve thisÂ claim under the Courtâ€™s qualified-immunity precedents. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S.Â 223, 236 (2009).

The Bradys are, of course, treating this like some kind of victory, but the fact is we got what we wanted here, and in a pretty non-damaging way. The Brady folks could have hoped for a lot more from a suit as reckless as this. The standard for overcoming qualified immunity is pretty high, and this dismissal here does not mean what the Brady folks would like it to mean. I am sure, however, we have not seen the last of Leonard Embody’s one man crusade to ruin Second Amendment precedent in the 6th Circuit.

When addressing a crowd of gun bloggers, Alan Gura mentioned the biggest threat to our Second Amendment rights was these kinds of oddball pro se litigants, who take forward bad cases with no legal expertise, and proceed to establish negative precedent that is difficult to overcome. So far, I think we’ve seen less of that than I expected. I applaud SAF and Mr. Gura for intervening in this case, and crushing it like the cockroach in the kitchen that it was.

I Wish NRA Would Focus More on the Courts in Public Rhetoric

NRA President David Keene talks to the Washington Times down in Tampa about the need to get rid of Obama:

Notice one argument missing? Nowhere is the 5-4 thread the Second Amendment is now hanging by even mentioned. Maybe they’ve focused grouped this or something, and the fact is that people just don’t really grasp the enormity of the danger, unless you hit them withÂ “We see him as the most anti-gun president in modern times.” But I’m pretty skeptical that this message is going to be more effective. We all remember Clinton. We all remember him using the bully pulpit ever time there was a mass shooting. We remember eight years of nothing but more gun control. I’m not sure this rhetoric passes the smell test.

But the Supreme Court issue does. I know my biggest fear is spending the next four years hoping that Scalia, Kennedy and even Thomas have really good doctors. There’s also the proverbial bus. Not to mention, at some point that 5 justice majority breaks, and I honestly don’t want to find out where that is without another pick up. Have NRA members become so detached from the issue we can no longer level with them? I mean, we’re talking about the Second Amendment being repealed from the Bill of Rights by judicial fiat. If that’s not enough to scare gun owners, we’re doomed.

Women & Guns

If you weren’t watching the RNC speeches last night, you really missed out. The women knocked every single ball out of the park. The men, save Paul Ryan who brought a little fire to the floor, largely fell flat. Tim Pawlenty’s speech wasn’t a roaring excitement, but he got in one hell of a dig against Obama, noting that many people fail in their first jobs. The humor in the audience reaction was how it took them a second to realize what he said, and then they cracked up.

However, there were a few moments the audience absolutely roared in applause and cheers. One was when Condi talked about how she could grow up in Jim Crow-era Alabama with parents who told her she could be anything she wanted to be – even president – and that the same little girl would go on to become Secretary of State. Another came from New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez when she talked about how hard her parents worked to start a small business – a security business – that she also worked at as a teenager. While this video trims the response by the crowd, you do get the hint that the floor went nuts for her talk of knowing how to defend herself.

The video also cuts off her follow-up line – that the gun weighed about as much as she did. For all the talk about platforms in recent days, those don’t really matter much. The reaction to this kind of comment reflects far more about the motivation of the party members. It’s not about what a few select people who we don’t elect pick out for a party platform, it’s about actual elected officials and candidates seeking our votes representing what people really believe. And we already know that the American people really do believe in the right to self-defense, even with a firearm.

I might add, for the GOP portrayed as the uptight do-gooders, her swear line in prime time tv hours got huge applause. Continue reading “Women & Guns”